Revel in the glory
I imagine that many developers today don’t properly appreciate the glory that is REST/JSON because it is such an elegant and beautiful solution. In 2000, it was Roy Fielding who had a “light bulb over the head” moment and saw the connection between standard CRUD operations and the GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE verbs of the HTTP protocol. His lovely insight opened our eyes to the notion that the web was more than a platform for serving documents. The web was, in and of itself, a giant computing platform.
Just like that, all of the marshalling and crazy protocols like DCOM, CORBA, and even SOAP were abstracted away. Today, REST rides along on a system that nearly every single computer in the world already can do. Security? Well, good old SSL/TLS will do the trick. And by leveraging Douglas Crockford’s very flexible and powerful JSON, or JavaScript Object Notation, nearly every difficulty and complexity in moving objects and code between computers and operating systems vanishes in a puff of smoke. REST made remote procedure calls as universal, scalable, and programming language-agnostic as the web itself. JSON took care of the rest.
Today, using REST/JSON is about as familiar to developers as breathing. Practically every library, programming language, and DBMS in the world supports REST/JSON and consumes it natively and naturally. REST/JSON could easily be viewed as the lifeblood of the web today.
